A plasma display panel of a self-luminous type has excellent visibility and is flat and suitable for large-screen display and high-speed display. For this reason, the plasma display panel has been rapidly spreading as a display panel to replace the CRT in recent years. On the other hand, increase of power consumption resulting from the rapid screen size increase poses a problem for a plasma display, and a resonance circuit called a power recovery circuit which regards a panel as a large capacitor is utilized. By this means, most of the input power is recovered and the reduction of power consumption can be achieved.
The invention described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2004-309983 (Patent Document 1) discloses a power recovery circuit comprising a resonance coil, a diode, a MOS transistor functioning as a switch, a capacitor for recovery, and the like in a path for charging and discharging a panel capacitor. According to the disclosure of Japanese Examined Patent Application Publication No. 07-109542 (Patent Document 2) in which the operation of the power recovery circuit is described in detail, by the resonance operation formed by a coil and a panel capacitor Cp of a plasma display panel, charges accumulated in the panel capacitor Cp are recovered in a recovery capacitor. Thereafter, charges recovered in the recovery capacitor are supplied to the panel capacitor Cp. Hereinafter, this action is referred to as “power recovery” for convenience sake.
As described above, the power recovery circuit is included in respective sustain drive circuits for X electrodes and Y electrodes. On the other hand, the power recovery circuit is one of the factors for complicating the sustain drive circuit. For the simplification of the recovery circuit, the reduction of the number of switches (hereinafter, recovery switch) provided in series in a path from the panel electrode to the recovery capacity has been proposed.
Since this method is disclosed in published Japanese translation of a PCT application No. 2003-533722 (Patent Document 3), detailed description thereof is omitted here. However, in order to realize the power recovery in spite of the reduction of the number of recovery switches, it is essential to achieve reliable propagation of drive voltage change applied to one electrode to the other electrode.